Do “Trend” Domain Names Make Good Investments?

There’s a category of domain names that I’ve never delved into and I honestly don’t know much about. I’m talking about “Trend” domain names, which might be a term I’m literally just making up right now so forgive me if there’s a more official term for what I’m talking about here.

By “Trend” domain names I mean domains that are registered because they align with a current trend or saying that is trending at the time. Google makes it easy to keep track of trends in both search and news through Google.com/trends and then of course there’s the “Trending Now” section on Twitter which I’ll admit I look at at least five times a day.

So here’s an example, the hashtag “FirstWordsToAliens” is trending right now with close to 5,000 tweets. The .COM is available as of this writing, so should you rush out to buy it? I personally think that even though a particular phrase or hashtag might be trending on Twitter, Google, or in the news, that doesn’t mean the corresponding domain name has any value.

I think the challenge for most “trend” domains is that it’s hard to think of who the potential buyer would be? Do you really think someone wants to buy FirstWordsToAliens.com to build a site listing the first words we would say to aliens? Probably not.

Now I’m not a fan of making blanket statements so I will say that of course there are a handful of “trend” domains that probably would have some meaningful value. That being said I think 95% or more of the trends out there wouldn’t make great domain investments. Like I said in the beginning of this post though, I don’t have any experience with “trend” domains so maybe I’m missing the boat here.